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78 Flight to Freedom
Mulatto Girl’s Town and Bucker Woman’s Town (United States). Though
some of these names may have been symbolic, it is likely that several of them
reflect the significant role that Maroon women played in the particular communities.
Summing up his discussion on gender, Fouchard (1972, 289) asserts
that the role of women in marronage was as important as it was in colonial
life in general.
Maroon Ethnicity
Various writers have argued that Maroon communities were organized
largely along ethnic lines. Contrary to what John Thornton (1998a, 201–5)
and some others suggest, Maroon societies, unlike slave societies, were not
built on ascriptive ethnic, colour or class criteria. Thornton notes that
enslaved persons on the plantations often married or otherwise associated
largely with their own ethnic (or national, according to him) groups, formed
ethnic associations that elected “kings” and other important figures, participated
in ethnic festivals and so on. He also states that in some countries these
festivals grew in importance, especially in urban centres. 12 However, he
pushes his argument about ethnicity too far when he suggests that Maroon
communities commonly organized themselves according to ethnic groupings.
While he proves his viewpoint about ethnic associations (if not ethnic
exclusiveness) on the plantations and in the urban communities, he fails to
do so in relation to Maroon communities.
He cites two examples in support of his belief: one of the runaway communities
around the city of Cartagena in the late seventeenth century, which
opted for a polity based on Akan ethnicity, and Palmares, which, he maintains,
opted for an Angolan one (ibid., 201–2) . There was also a palenque near
Cartagena in the late seventeenth century, containing an estimated 110 people,
allegedly comprising only Creole Blacks (Borrego Plá 1973, 33). However,
the relatively few examples of ethnic polities are insufficient to validate
Thornton’s claim about Maroon societies, given the thousands of them that
are believed to have existed during the slavery period. It is also debatable that
Palmares, while a predominantly Angolan polity, can be viewed as an exclusive
one (Flory 1979, 123; Anderson 1996, 565). Another Maroon settlement
that existed along Colombia’s Prata River in 1809, while predominantly
Hausa, nevertheless contained other ethnic groups (Reis 1993, 43).